Home Page Forums MAME MAME How to load tapes?

Sorry for the stupid question, but...

Everytime I try to load a tape in any driver, the counter goes to 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes... I even sleep and nothing happens... What am I doing wrong? I won't lie, I never had a system which uses tapes. Never saw one in real life. And, because of this, I don't know exactly how to use them.

And what means the number at the side of the counter (00:17 in 2600/SuperCharger, for example)? Is it supposed to be the time when something appears on the screen?

The time indication is the time the tape has been loading or recording, nothing more, nothing less.

Some systems allowed control over the motor of the cassette player and those are the easiest to load. General rule is stop the running tape, rewind to the beginning of the tape, type the appropriate commands in the emulated system to start tape loading and start the tape. That should load the tape.